Dark Horse
by AmberPalette
Summary: A journal entry by Zelgadiss and Amelia's second-born child, about the endearing quirks of members of the Greywers and Seyruun family, and where she fits in. Nothing spectacular, mainly gratuitous fluff. ZelAme shipping, obviously.


**Dark Horse**

**A Slayers Fanfiction by Amber C.S. (AmberPalette)**

_Disclaimer: Slayers is © Hajime Kanazaka, Software Sculptors, Funimation, and J.C. Staff. This is a short monologue-heavy rumination on the part of Zelgadiss and Amelia's second of three children (as envisioned by myself and Roxy Cybelle Gil) about a decade after the events of Slayers Evolution-R. In this storyline, Rezo has returned to life a third time, still blind but finally free of Ruby-Eyed Shabranigdu, and has, with Amelia's help, cured Zelgadiss. Zelgadiss has married Amelia and become not only Captain of the Seyruun Palace Guard, but also Prince Regent of Seyruun. Obviously, this story ships ZelAme, so if that's not your thing, this isn't for you. In this story, Rezo's late wife, Zelgadiss's Great-Grandmother, has also been reincarnated in the person of Ezra, who is an OC of Roxy Cybelle Gil._

_Please enjoy the gratuitous Greywers-Seyruun family mush. 3_

My family is distinct for its signature births.

They say my older brother Ren slid out with the congenial ease of a seal through water.

My brother is quiet, unassuming, and always does what is necessary, without complaint, without rummaging for praise. He has the best judgment of anyone I know. Ren feels passionately, like a dark current of water, under his mild, measured features. But he only taps into that zeal when it is most judicious and altruistic.

Ren has my mother's inky hair color, and my father's eyes, eyes the hue of the clearest palest water under the sun, the color of the forget-me-nots in mama's garden where, familial lore has it, dad proposed to her. The aura he glows, a charming genetic quirk descended along my paternal line, is the same steady cobalt as dad's.

And they say my younger sister Zoe, whose very name means "life," came out glowing the warm red magical aura of our eldest living male sire—who had a remarkable birth, too, his infant eyes sealed shut by a demon, his life spent defying it and performing healing miracles—and laughing.

Zoe, who is the unquestionable center of our entire family's affection, an incandescent star around which we all pivot, popped out red and giggling.

They say my father, who is the most guarded soul I know, was smitten with that laughing baby the moment he first held her. I don't doubt it. He hasn't stopped smiling at her mere presence since.

And I? I gave my mama the most strenuous pregnancy, with the greatest plenitude of hormones for weepiness and wrath. I was determined to be breech-born and threaten her life. I was lifted out of her shrieking sobs and refusing to open my eyes, which are mama's deep ultramarine hue. Though I am reassured they all passed me around, I squeezed my maternal grandpa's black whiskers, and I was given my middle name, Celeste, because I "completed" the family's schema of members who were like various celestial bodies….the only thing remarkable about me that I can glean was my shock of lavender hair, just like dad's, made me a "beautiful replica" of him, and that, while yanking on my grandpa's moustache and gazing in awe at my mama's enormous smile, I displayed the loud, quixotically confident, imperious laugh of my maternal aunt.

I will admit it: at times I feel I am the dark horse of the Greywers-Seyruun family.

The one who does not always smile for photographs, the one who sometimes sleeps in, the one who will study tomes through a party, the one who prefers the brashness of coffee to everyone else's delicately whispered green tea, the one who flushes and shrinks from bold displays of physical affection. All contradictions, but these characteristics share one thing in common: they make me unapproachable and bothersome.

I have the exact temperament of my father, and I am proud of it. But he and I have always expressed a mutual awkwardness.

I think it is because we are terrified of wounding each other with our formidable brusqueness. We are both cautious and surly because we are, truly, fragile in some way that is difficult to pinion. We have steel souls, but glass hearts, dad and me.

I am more comfortable with mama, who says I have a soft underbelly just like dad, and my very old, very calm, very wise Great Sage of a great-great-grandfather agrees. He frequently calls dad a "hedgehog" interchangeably with "the sun": brilliant, constant, zealous, and sometimes burning.

Third-degree burns, if you get dad angry enough, or make him feel you've violated his sacred trust.

Not that I personally have, but I've witnessed some zingers.

After all dad's name, Zelgadiss, does mean "God's zeal." And I am inclined to listen to my Gam-Gam, whose name, Rezo, means "I pray."

Funny thing, that. Gam-Gam, gentle melancholy Gam-Gam, who has a past he likes to hide in a dark nook collecting dust, "prays grey words," words that become tired and hopeless without answers, and dad's the "zeal of God" for which he prays.

It fits.

They are really…symbiotic. I watch them together and I always get the feeling they spent a long time, well before I was born, needing only each other. Our family's expanded well beyond them, sort of like a knit web unfurling, but there is still that unmistakable bond of two—the first two stitches.

For Gam-Gam always has this faint desperation to him. Like he's haunted, chased at the heels by something crushing, and atoning for it.

I know the whole story about the demon vaster than the ocean that was crammed down into his soul, that drove him eccentric, opportunistic, and finally mad, and made him do things that were selfish and reckless to dad and others.

But the concept of being afraid of or angry at Gam-Gam is absurdly alien.

For aside the deep lines under each now-opened, enormous brown eye (oh yes, Zoe has Gam-Gam's eyes too), I see no trace of such depravity now. Except in that guilt that pursues him left and right, and that, I've noticed, only dad can really grind to a halt. With very little effort. Dad's mumbled word of comfort or praise, his brushed kiss against Gam-Gam's forehead, and my great-great-grandsire radiates quiet joy the rest of an afternoon.

It may be why he and I are so close—if I am so like dad. When Elethea, their second child, the child of their renewed, reincarnated life together, would lend me her territory, I spent every weekend in Gam-Gam's and Gamama Ezzie's bedroom, when I was a toddler and well into my preteens, reading stories and cuddling up against Gam-Gam. Something about him, like mama, makes me feel unashamed to be warm and demonstrative. Cozy. It was to Gam-Gam I went when I was five or six, and wet the bed, and was too embarrassed to tell anyone else. He fixed everything, changed the sheets, cleaned me up, combed my hair, turned the page of a new book and felt and spoke its words, with his long white healer's hands, like he always does. He makes me temporarily certain that I am not the problem child, that there is no problem child, in this family.

Gam-Gam was the one who delivered me, safely, even though I was determined to come out breech. Sometimes there are stragglers here and there who still castigate him behind his back, viciously, call him a fringe mad scientist, a freak, a manipulator who uses his sweetness and charm to do unholy and selfish things.

Among them are people whose lives, like mine, he has saved from the most ravaging diseases.

Some gratitude.

Selective vision, more like. I have to fight the tendency to clock them, when their words are spit, and Gam-Gam folds into himself for days in a mental prison of self-flagellation, seized by the past and its mistakes. Those people who do that to him make me sad, mainly. Because they lack something very fundamental that makes human beings…well, human beings. They lack compassion, which is NOT the same as condoning.

Mama's a "Justice Girl," but she has that compassion. That's why she's my hero.

I also enjoy it when Grandpa Phil breaks a piece of furniture with the martial arts move he has christened "Pacifist Crush," and roars scoldings down on such people, who hurry away with their shifty eyes and their false apologies.

Grandpa Phil's another hero of mine.

I am closest, I think, to mama, Aunt Naga, and Gam-Gam, out of the adults in our brood.

I am even less like mama than I am like Gam-Gam, but it doesn't matter. Something about her disarms me, in a good way.

Mama is a hero to me, too, because mama always loved dad. When Gam-Gam lost his mind and used dad's devotion against him, and turned him into the person in photographs that I have seen…photographs like the one in a locket mama wears, the one that had belonged to her mama, who was killed…when that happened, dad was trapped inside this crusty, rough-hewn, blue shell, with little bits of golem hematite all over his face, all over what parts of his arms he would let show under layers of death-white long-sleeved tunics and cloaks. Hs ears had been pointed and his eyes slit with a subcutaneous blow demon. The photograph was of a moody, aching, forlorn boy trying so hard to be an impenetrable fortress of man.

Mama still cherished every inch of that boy. Theirs was a…rocky…start, when mama was fourteen and green and prone to blurting indiscretions. But past the initial naivety, mama saw the person under the four prison walls of his own body: "handsome, tough, stoic, silently loyal, Cel, that's always been your daddy," she habitually tells me.

Dad follows suit by coughing and becoming busy polishing his broadsword, while trying to hide a lopsided grin.

It's cute.

One way in which dad and I are close is through my pranks. I always play them on him, with Aunt Naga's help. One day I got a jack-in-the-box from Gam-Gam's laboratory and showed it to Aunt Naga. She tittered in her terrifyingly confident way and sent the palace guard for one hundred more such toys. We lined them all up in mama and dad's dark bedroom and wound each one to the popping point. I coquetted at dad with unusual docility to go get me my favorite storybook from the shelf by their canopied bed.

Dad sauntered unsuspectingly into the bedroom and turned on the light. Every single jack-in-the-box exploded open at once.

Dad screamed—not shouted, no, shed masculinity altogether and let out a soprano _shriek_—before drawing his broadsword at the sea of "pop goes the weasel." Then he turned to us, Aunt Naga and me cackling in the doorway, his lip screwed up, his face rivaling a tomato. It was so funny that I didn't stop laughing until my ribs creaked with strain and my lungs were wrung of air, and my eyes rained amusement. Then dad snatched me up and tickled me until I nearly blacked out.

Oh, man. It was great.

But back to mama.

My favorite memory of mama is a strange one.

When I was about ten, and in the girls' bathroom of the small class given to daughters of Seyruun royalty, nobles, and priest and priestess's young family members, I ran across the class bully. She was a jealous marquise's daughter.

She was showing off her sheer pantyhose and a slutty-cut miniskirt, going on and on about her smooth silky legs.

While briskly washing my hands at the sink, I fired back that it wasn't like we were hairy animals, and fixation on body hair was bizarre.

The bully leveled an icy sneer at me and out of her glossy lips slunk, "You're pretty damned close, your HIGHness."

I looked down at my legs. They were indeed a forest of fine pale periwinkle threads. I retreated into a bathroom stall, chased by her derisive laughter. I cried there silently all day, and didn't come out after the bell rang. Mama had to come into the bathroom to get me. Mama is small but her hugs have force, zeal, and warmth, so one feels enveloped all the same.

She tipped my chin up and asked me what was the matter. I told her I didn't want to wear shorts anymore and asked that the subject be dropped. Mama squinted at me, perceptively, while she squatted there in front of the toilet on which I sat, and I squirmed, and she kept her peace.

That evening when I went into my bedroom I was greeted with a room literally stuffed full of thick tights. Striped, starred, toed, toeless, polkadotted, printed with various words, any chic pop trend in tights, you name it. With it was a note saying, "Precious Cel, Mama has bought you all the tights in Seyruun. They are thick enough that leg hair is hidden, and you can keep wearing your favorite shorts if you want to stay little, and not shave like a lady yet. But if you want to shave like a lady, Mama will be in the bathroom all night with razors and cream ready. Love and kisses forever, Mama."

I went to the bathroom. I shaved and was a refined lady with silky—spindly, scrawny, pale—legs for the first time. They were decorated with bandaids: battle scars of maturation. It was almost worse than two years later when I got my first period. But I loved those bandaids, and ever since that day, when mama bought me a city of tights and taught me to shave, her soft round hand guiding my own along my calves, her voice soothing and reassuring and bright, I have been wearing every damn pair she bought me.

I call it Project Mamapants. And the school bully was expelled the next semester.

JUSTICE.

So maybe the day I was born, it wasn't such a curse after all. Maybe it is okay if I like to sit in the corner sometimes. Because somebody always comes to get me and draw me back into the family circle. Maybe I am a strange mosaic of family traits, no more or less valuable than my siblings and forebears.

If that's the case, I'm proudly the dark horse of the Greywers-Seyruun clan.

I am Seyruun: Hear me cackle with terrifying determination and hauteur!

_OHHH HO HO HO HO HOOO._

Proud indeed.


End file.
